Presidential Power in Crisis: The Rallying Effect Explained

The Executive and Legislative Balance in Crisis

Historically, the significance of the executive branch has increased during periods of war, crisis, and economic turmoil, while the legislative branch has assumed greater responsibility during peaceful reprieves and ostensibly stable times. The relationship between these two branches is complicated, but the increase of power and prestige of the president during crisis times must be approached in two ways: the president as a more efficient executive administrator of policy, and the president as symbolic leader.

The Constitution provides the president with certain powers that enhance his ability to perform in crisis situations, and, given the increased significance of the media in American politics over the last half-century, the president's role as a symbolic figure is more important than ever.

Constitutional Powers and Congressional Constraints

There is a generally perceived division between the executive and legislative branches: Congress is steeped in bureaucratic and intensely inefficient processes, while the president maintains the ability to act quickly. During wartime, this has proved true, but not solely as a result of that simple dichotomy. The president's ability to act is always bound to congressional approval. As stipulated in the Constitution, the president does serve as the Commander-in-Chief of both the army and navy of the United States, but the president may not declare war without congressional support. While the president may proceed with military action regardless of a formal declaration of war, funding for such operations necessarily depends on Congress.

Presidents have, of course, long since learned how to skirt constitutional limits on their power: in Lincoln's first address to Congress, he announced that he had mobilized troops and engaged the South, but carefully avoided use of the word "war." The president has the power to make foreign treaties, but again, only provided that two-thirds of all senators agree. It would seem, then, that the presupposition concerning the president's ability to act with unfettered resolve is more problematic than initially formulated. An examination of public opinion and the "rallying effect" illuminates this topic.

Consider the overwhelming approval and support President Bush received following September 11. His entrance into the White House had been mired in controversy, and both his policy and authority were being challenged at every level. The attacks of September 11 consolidated a populist body so entirely in his favor that resisting his policies would certainly result in political death in the court of public opinion. Recall the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's McCarthy-esque interrogation of college professors and students demonstrating what it deemed unpatriotic sentiment. Members of Congress, too, owe the continuation of their positions to the public, and when the electorate as a whole rallies behind one figure, it becomes political poison to resist that executive tide. The president then executes his power not in spite of congressional checks and balances, but with absolute congressional consent. The president's executive power derives from his symbolic authority — and this brings us to the question of where and whether the symbolic and political terrain can be differentiated.

The Rallying Effect and Symbolic Leadership

In his seminal work The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis dates the "rallying effect" back to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was the first president to believe that the chief executive had a duty to shape public opinion, not merely reflect it. The "rallying effect" has a basic modus operandi: a disparate and conflicted body politic will be effectively united and directed if the multitude of political and cultural disorders can be consolidated into one symbolic threat or cause.

This formula finds its most extreme realization in pre-World War II Germany under Hitler. The burden of reparations from the Treaty of Versailles, along with a splintered infrastructure and a devastated economy, was reshaped and refocused on the Jewish population. The "rallying effect" is undeniable in this extreme case, but it operates in more subtle ways as well. Inasmuch as the Soviet Empire posed a significant nuclear threat during the Cold War, its true importance was largely a symbolic one. For almost fifty years, the United States depended on the "Evil Empire" as the prime enemy — as necessary to the economy as the automobile industry or the stock exchange. The perennial threat of Soviet aggression endowed nine presidents with popular authority: stop the Soviets. The threat, however real or exaggerated, was symbolically used to enhance the political authority of the president. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in the winter of 1981, he understood that aircraft carriers could be employed as visual aids, simultaneously instantiating the reality of the enemy and the necessity of a greater military. The focus on defense spending allowed Reagan to further his economic policies of deficit spending.

Conclusion: The President as Crisis Actor

Critical times of war or social upheaval provide a dramatic stage for the president — the nation's prime actor — to perform. As undisputed champion of the "cause," Congress must make allowances for the president that it would not normally. War exaggerates the executive's symbolic role, and caught within the presidential dialectic of the symbolic and the political, the president's power and prestige increase considerably. The enduring lesson of American political history is that crisis does not simply hand power to the executive; rather, the skilled president constructs and maintains the symbolic conditions under which that power becomes politically irresistible.

Selected Bibliography

Herring, George. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950–1975. New York: McGraw Hill, 1995.

Sandel, Michael. Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Policy. New York: Belknap, 1998.

Tulis, Jeffrey. The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.